Incheon, South Korea - Two CMS students, Cristina Subt and Theresa King, along with professor Eugene Domack, recently ventured to a meeting with the Korean Polar Research Institute in Incheon to organize future research expeditions aboard the South Korean ice breaker, Araon. From there, the group traveled to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and attended the Scientific Committee of Antarctic Research (SCAR) meeting from August 20-30, 2016. This meeting is an international meeting bringing together representatives of all nations actively conducting research in Antarctica.

Cristina Subt presented a poster on her recent research, and Dr. Domack and Theresa King both presented oral presentations of their research at the meeting. Theresa King received best overall oral presentation for early career scientist.

ST. PETERSBURG, FL - CMS Ph.D student Imogen Browne and CMS Assistant Professor Amelia Shevenell have been selected to sail on International Ocean Discovery Program Expedition 374 to the Ross Sea, Antarctica in early 2018. The two month expedition will drill sites in the Ross Sea that will enable a better understanding of the evolution of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet over the last 20 million years. Reconstructing ice sheet response during past warm climates is critical for modeling and predicting future ice sheet response and global sea level rise. This expedition was first proposed by Shevenell and her collaborators in 2012, following a workshop at USF CMS. Both Browne and Shevenell will sail as two of the ten Americans in the 35 member international science party.

The two month expedition aboard the D/V Joides Resolution, will leave from Wellington, New Zealand in January of 2018. Browne will sail as a Physical Properties specialist and Shevenell will lead a team of eight Sedimentologists. Post cruise, the two will conduct geochemical analyses of the recovered sediments to understand the role of ocean temperatures in West Antarctic Ice Sheet evolution

ST. PETERSBURG, FL - NSF has funded USF College of Marine Science researchers to probe the nature of organic carbon in the water column and the sediment beneath subglacial Lake Mercer in Antarctica. The lake sites beneath over 1 km of ice and is episodically drained and filled by subglacial flow of water from the Mercer Ice Stream. USF researchers are part of an international group that will probe the lake for life after accessing it through the thick ice sheet. Water chemistry, sedimentary microbes, and the nature of the organic carbon within the sediments will be targeted for information about how life thrives and how carbon is cycled in these remote, isolated ecosystems. Of fundamental importance is analysis of whether marine carbon sources are the basis of life in these lakes as they may have had past incursions of marine water. The project website is www.salsa-antarctica.org

ANTARCTICA - The past 48 hours (approximately) have been relatively calm as far as work goes since some bad weather (35-45 knot winds) has halted over-the-deck operations. However, we were able to maintain station long enough (3.5 hours) for a rosette CTD and Amelia’s water pumping, which allows her and her colleagues at USF and elsewhere to collect archaea in different water masses and compare their population genomics. Visit Expedition Antarctica for more of the article.

ANTARCTICA - The past week has been full of quintessential Antarctic experiences. I want to highlight these in the blog today because I actually spend a lot of time in the lab rather than outside on deck, so these experiences have been very special. Visit Expedition Antarctica for more of the article.

ANTARCTICA - The seismic guns deliver a low energy pulse into the water column, which may have the potential to negatively affect marine mammals if they are exposed to 180 decibels or more in the water. Visit Expedition Antarctica to read the rest of the article.

ANTARCTICA - The only shipboard analysis we are doing for the JPCs on this particular cruise is for magnetic susceptibility (MS). MS gives us clues as to the geologic provenance of the sediments and entrained coarse material, which serves as a proxy for the depositional environment: a high MS indicates the presence of terrigenous material likely to have fallen out of the bottom of a glacier, whereas a low MS indicates a more open-water depositional environment and the absence of an overlying glacier. By running MS on the JPC and JGCs (and JTC, the trigger core), we can see what sediment we collected and start to loosely define different sedimentary and climatic events. Visit Expedition Antarctica to view the rest of the article.